Around the Blogosphere

A client is moving her portfolio to the robo-advisor Wealthsimple, where she will save a minimum of $5,000 in annual fees. Her former advisor is not happy about this, as you’d expect, and sent an email filled with all the reasons why she’d be better off staying invested in his actively managed mutual funds. Most…

No, I didn’t get blocked by Suze Orman. But respected journalist and consumer advocate Ellen Roseman did when she had the audacity to call out Suze on Twitter, saying, “giving advice made Suze Orman rich and famous, which makes it harder for her to offer advice to normal people anymore.” Ellen tweeted in response to…

What’s your biggest money fear? The answer likely depends on your age and stage of life. Twenty-somethings might say they fear living in debt forever, or that they’ll never be able to afford a home. Those in their thirties might fear they’ll never stop living paycheque to paycheque. Forty-somethings might fear losing their job and…

It’s frustrating to feel like you’re not making any progress with your finances. Maybe you haven’t got a raise for a while, or you’ve been slogging away at debt payments for months at a time, or a stock market dip took your investments right back to where you started. Some people get desperate to make…

The reason I put so much emphasis on low investment fees is because it’s one of the few key areas that investors can control (the others being asset allocation, rebalancing, and savings rate). Yet most investors focus on the area they cannot control – their portfolio returns. While it’s reasonable to expect investment returns in…

We’re getting ready for our 32-day trip to the Scotland and Ireland this summer and our family could not be more excited about the itinerary we have planned. One thing that does concern me about the trip is the low Canadian dollar. The loonie hit an 11-day low on Friday, sinking to 74.53 cents USD.…

The FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) has taken the personal finance blogosphere by storm of late, with numerous bloggers chronicling their journey towards financial independence. Several high profile bloggers have even achieved FIRE, gaining wide spread attention from mainstream media and leading to book publishing opportunities. The quest for financial independence certainly isn’t new…

In the last five years we’ve seen the rise of robo-advisors offering low cost online portfolio management to investors large and small. Investors pay a management fee of around 0.50 percent plus another 0.20 percent or so for the robo-advisor to hold the underlying ETFs. This is a massive improvement from a traditional mutual fund…

It never gets old. I’m talking about Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. The famous Oracle of Omaha beat the market again, increasing the market value of Berkshire by 2.8 percent versus the 4.4 percent loss suffered by the S&P 500 in 2018. Buffett’s letter always includes a good dose of wisdom and…

Dividend investors tend to have an almost blind faith in the steadiness of companies in which they invest. They want to invest in businesses that have paid dividends for many years and, more importantly, have a track record of growing those dividends each year for decades or more. Reliable dividends mean never worrying about the…